Great reporting from Vanity Fair on how administration officials were involved in developing the interrogation techniques to be used at Gitmo. This tidbit is particularly disturbing:
The first year of Fox TV’s dramatic series 24 came to a conclusion in spring 2002, and the second year of the series began that fall. An inescapable message of the program is that torture works. “We saw it on cable,” Beaver recalled. “People had already seen the first series. It was hugely popular.” Jack Bauer had many friends at Guantánamo, Beaver added. “He gave people lots of ideas.”
I don’t know what’s more disturbing: the fact that torture had become so acceptable that folks within the military were taking ideas from TV shows, or the fact that there were so few instructions on how to torture that folks within the military were taking ideas from TV shows.
Immorality plus incompetence. And there’s your Bush Administration in a nutshell.
